Mary Ellen Rudin

The daughter of a civil engineer and a high school teacher, Mary was born in Texas and went to college at the University of Texas. She credits Robert Lee Moore, a professor there, with cultivating her interest in mathematics. Since 1950 she has been active in the American Mathematical Society. After earning her Ph.D., she went on to teach at Duke University, where she met Walter Rudin, an Austrian Jew who had served in the British Navy during World War II and earned his Ph.D. at Duke at the same time Mary got hers at Texas. The two married and had four children. They moved to Madison, Wisconsin and both began teaching at the University of Wisconsin, where Mary Rudin has supervised more than a dozen Ph.D. students. They live in a home built by famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright.

Mary Rudin’s interest is primarily in topological spaces. She co-authored with Paul Erdős a paper on “A non-normal box product” which has been published in two different colloquia, earning her Erdős number (http://planetmath.org/ErdHosNumber) 1.